Model Says Barry Often Used Drugs

June 28, 1990|By Steve Daley, Chicago Tribune.

WASHINGTON — Rasheeda Moore, a former model recruited by the FBI to lure Mayor Marion Barry into an undercover sting operation in January, told a packed courtroom Wednesday that she had used cocaine with Barry ``more than 100 times.``

Under direct examination by prosecutors in the drug and perjury trial of the three-term mayor, Moore recounted a three-year odyssey of drug use and sexual intimacy with Barry.

According to Moore, she and Barry smoked crack cocaine, marijuana and opium in a host of private homes and hotel rooms-even a bishop`s home-as well as in the mayor`s office and once in his Southwest Washington home.

``It could be any time of day,`` Moore, 39, said of Barry`s drug use.

``Before meetings, after meetings, he would take a hit off the (crack)

pipe.``

Prosecutors hope Moore`s testimony, along with that of convicted drug dealer Charles Lewis` last week, will establish a pattern of drug use by Barry as well as demonstrate that he lied to a grand jury last year about his behavior.

Barry`s lawyers intend to maintain that Moore cut a deal with prosecutors to aid in entrapping the mayor at Washington`s Vista Hotel on Jan. 18. Moore testified that she was contacted by the FBI about assisting in an undercover operation after being arrested in California on drunken-driving charges Jan. 1.

Moore testified Wednesday that she frequently made cocaine purchases for the mayor, and that once, after she spurned his sexual advances, he struck her, knocking her down.

``He asked me if he could make love to me. He made mention of another man. . . . He slapped me. I slapped him back. He slapped me again and I wound up on the floor. . . .

``He was yelling, `I haven`t hit a woman in 20 years. You bring out the worst in a man,` `` Moore said.

On another occasion, Moore said, she and Barry smoked crack in the suburban Virginia home of Bishop H.H. Brookins, leader of several hundred African Methodist-Episcopal congregations in the Washington area. Moore said she thought Brookins was sleeping at the time and was unaware of the drug use. Throughout the day Wednesday, Barry`s wife, Effi, watched without expression as Moore chronicled a series of liaisons with the mayor between 1986 and 1989. Even after she broke off her sexual relationship with Barry, Moore testified, she continued to share drugs with him.

Moore said she had been ``eaten up with guilt because of the adultery.``

Once when she said she tried to break off the relationship, Barry talked her out of it. ``He told me it was divine providence that we were together,`` she said.

After 1988, Moore claimed that she and the mayor smoked crack cocaine at her mother`s house in Northwest Washington. On one visit to the house, she said, Barry seemed to lose control after ingesting the drug, shaking so violently that Moore had to hold him up.

Moore said Barry was an experienced drug user who baked powdered cocaine into crack. ``After he baked it, we smoked it,`` Moore testified.

And she said that after smoking crack cocaine in one session, Barry

``said he was addicted to cocaine. He said he wanted to quit.``

After his arrest Jan. 18, Barry went into an alcohol abuse program.

For his part Wednesday, Barry appeared relaxed, at one point displaying for reporters a photograph of the Barrys with South African nationalist leader Nelson Mandela taken at a rally in Washington Tuesday night.

Barry, 54, has pleaded innocent to 10 misdemeanor cocaine possession charges, one misdemeanor cocaine conspiracy charge and three felony charges of lying to a grand jury about his alleged drug use.